First team coach all but confirms Wenger is staying. How utterly depressing.

Was just going to let the Saturday post move to a Sunday one, but then I saw ENABLER Boro Primorac drop a beast in the Croatian press.

“Arsenal’s strength in the past 20 years has been Wenger. It is not all about results, but also business part of the club that matters.”

Arsene Wenger and his press lackey’s keep on dropping strawmen arguments and straight up falsehoods into the media.

‘We were the never the worst of the English clubs in the Champions League’

‘Top 4 is like a trophy’

‘Always nothing is good enough’

Now we have Boro marvelling at being a businessman and claiming football isn’t about just results.

Wrong, Boro.

Football is a totally results driven game. The two cannot be spliced. They are the same thing.

We are leaving £100m on the table because our results have not lived up to the standard of Manchester United. Real Madrid always strive to have the best results because they want the best commercial deals. There is literally no elite club in the world that isn’t striving for the best results.

Only an Arsenal coach could come out and talk about business. That is not his job. The fact our commercials trail our rivals is because our brand isn’t strong enough to demand the big dollars. Brand strength in football is usually related to success at a given point in time. It fades when you don’t win, which is why United are throwing bad money at the problem.

The fact this sort of attitude permeates the top management of our club really is a worry. The fact the owner and the management are constantly trying to reframe success to match whatever failure they’ve overseen is incredibly depressing not only for us as fans – but for the players who must also feel deflated at the old boys club Arsene is running.

There is no will to win, there is only a desire to survive. Arsenal are not about glory, they’re about self-preservation. Everyone is fattened up and suckling on the Arsene Wenger milk breast. Journalists writing books about their god. A CEO taking a salary so big, he can’t ever complain. Players feeding on a grossly over the top socialist wage structure. Fans too middle class and drowned in nostalgia to make things difficult. It’s never ending. The whole system is rigged against change and winning.

“Wenger isn’t considering leaving Arsenal,” (Boro)

Now it looks almost certain Wenger is going to sign on again. What’s to stop him doing another three years after that? What is going to force the clubs hand? How many great managers are we going to let pass us by?

Nathan e-mailed this sporting horror story to me a few weeks ago, it’s a big passage, but you need to read about it.

Connie Mack was synonymous with the Philadelphia Athletics. The team’s manager since its inception in 1901, Mack was the “Tall Tactician,” the “Spindly Strategist,” and the “Grand Old Man of Baseball.” In his fifty-year tenure (1901–50) at the helm of the A’s, Mack notched 3,582 victories, a total exceeded only by his 3,814 defeats. As time marched on, the losses mounted faster than the wins. When in 1943 the club experienced a 20-game losing streak, Mack expressed bewilderment and despair. “I can’t understand it,” he observed. “It would seem, under the very law of averages that we would get in a winning game somewhere.”

Fans vented their ire at the continual losing, and much of it was directed at Connie Mack. Letters to the A’s made clear the fans’ preferences. One declared, “Why doesn’t he [Connie] step down and give a younger man a chance?” Another wrote, “He should know the parade has passed him by.” Patrons clearly wanted Mack to go as the Athletics’ manager, and they linked the prospect of his departure to any chance the team would have to turn around its abysmal performance.

The great drawback in having Connie Mack as both president and manager of the Athletics became increasingly apparent as the years passed. Only he could fire himself as manager, and he lingered on far too long in that unfulfilled quest for one more pennant-contending team.

Any other franchise would have let him go at some point during the seventeen years before 1950, a period during which the club finished in the first division only once. But Mack stubbornly held on, defying the wishes from within and outside the organization that he step aside as manager.

As the years passed, Connie Mack’s encroaching senility grew more pronounced. The deterioration in his mind was apparent by the mid-1940s, and the team suffered from his mental lapses. Poor trades, incorrect signals from the bench (the most obvious of which coaches would override), sudden acts of emotional rage, and lapses into bygone days during gametime (calling out for past players to pinch-hit) all contributed to the team’s woes on the field.

The abysmal 1950 season was the last straw. Sons Roy and Earle pressured Connie, then 87 years old, to give up his managerial role after the season. In the end he agreed, but reluctantly. “I’m not quitting because I’m getting old,” he said. “I’m quitting because I think people want me to.”

His friends telling him it’s over won’t move him. A neglected family doesn’t phase him. It’s all about him.

It’s all about him.

He doesn’t love the club as much as he loves himself. He’s addicted to the power of the job and how that makes him feel. If he truly cared about Arsenal, he’d move on. He won’t though, he’s too wrapped up in his own mortality, status and fear of the next chapter.

So we all sit here and suffer. Elite mediocrity. A rich old man’s play thing.

How thoroughly depressing.

Right, see you in the comments. x

756 Responses to “First team coach all but confirms Wenger is staying. How utterly depressing.”

One year extension shows how inept this board is with no strategic plan in place and no nous to do what is right, the right way.

IMO, no one expected Leicester to win the league last season, which had destroyed a few myths this ‘administration’ (because I can’t call it management) hid behind successfully for nearly a decade. Le Grove has been one of places where the wood was seen for the trees for all that time.

I was redpilled in the summer after the 07/08 season. This was the time when I saw how the Dein-less lot with Fiszman terminally ill were completely full of shit.

This team is better on paper than Denilsong era lot, but looks just as boring and ineffective.